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Testing out #PicoGUS on the #Hand386… it’s a mixed bag. The ISA reset line is noisy so it constantly resets the Pico unless I put Kapton tape over the pad on the connector, and several productions have DMA issues (surprise!!). Here it is playing the song that epitomized the trend of sine leads in mid-90s tracker music, Infinity by Khyron and Necros:
And because it uses a laptop VGA controller that forces refresh to 60Hz, a lot of demos run slowly or not at all. All Future Crew demos are too slow, for example.
@polpo Having flashbacks to owning a GUS back in the 90's and being simultaneously excited and disappointed. It was great tech for the time, but the company didn't support it properly. They spent a great deal of effort providing SoundBlaster support in software that they never got working 100% and then other horses won the race.
@kazriko I’ve tried pulling it down with a 1K resistor and it didn’t really improve much. The noise still looks the same on my scope (about 2V P-P)
@polpo That looks like a decent underpowered pocketchip
with a proper keyboard.
If it had a 486 with 32MB of RAM I'd run Delicate Linux with a libred kernel and some custom libressl/mbedtls builds and lynx/dillo.
@polpo 70hz was an odd refresh rate but im sure there were reasons, presumably to reduce flicker.
Thanks to some tips from yyzkevin on Discord, I learned you can poke at registers on the 65535 VGA controller on this thing to put it into CRT mode, allowing 70Hz VGA modes. Second Reality now plays music at full speed! https://www.yyzkevin.com/pc110/65535-2/
@polpo This is way deep into "why? because we can!" territory. That is such a funky little 386 computer... with an external ISA port no less!
@polpo The moment I read Second Reality I heard the music in my head. Funny how that is still stored while I forgot what I ate this morning.